See, I love Blur, and I think "For Tomorrow" is one of their best songs, and YES, this is when they figured out "hey, let's be cheeky and extra British and just create weird singable songs" and basically pushed britpop a bit further than Suede had been able to do. So it's easy for me to give this a high rating. But, then, think of it like this: this is Blur's "The Bends." It works in parallel. Both bands recorded an album that sounded a bit like a last gasp of a dying scene (Pablo Honey / Leisure) and then shifted things to create what felt like a fresh new look at the band (The Bends / Modern Life). They followed these albums up with even better versions (OK Computer / Parklife) before eventually messing around and moving into True Art in their later years (OK Computer and on; Blur and on; - the only real difference is that Blur snuck a third cheeky album in before their art phase with The Great Escape). Anyway, this is all a way of convincing myself that it's okay to give this five stars. I'm doing it.

Of the The The albums I've heard, this is the one I forgot about.

Nah.

This is my favorite Nirvana album. It's pure 90s and it's wonderful.

This is Not My Thing ™

My favorite Beatles solo album, but not the BEST Beatles Solo album.

The only thing that would boost this rating is if this was the album with Billy Joel's Good Song: "You May Be Right"

An absolute perfect post-punk / new wave album from a band that ended up becoming a superstar pop group. This Go-Go’s album is one I pull out and listen to AT LEAST once a year, if not more.

Four stars for two legendary songs (Both "Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" are iconic and wonderful) but on a personal level, I always struggle to get on board with and/or keep my attention on Rolling Stones album cuts.

It was fine.

Oh, I know this one! There was a time when I thought this was scary, then I went through a metal phase and thought it was pretty good, and now I recognize Pantera as a band with a tragic history and a problematic singer and a sound that is very much of its era

It's good! I would never listen to this on the regular, but if it showed up in a playlist I'd recognize it as a Very Good Vibe.

There was a time when it felt like Green Day had lost the plot. Thank god for George Bush: this is often the third best Green Day album if you're an old fan (because Kerplunk still holds those heartstrings) but the best or second best if you're a normal person.

This is my favorite Nirvana album. It's pure 90s and it's wonderful.

I'm pretty excited to see some britpop in here, but this one is One Gigantic Song and a bunch of okay songs.

I love some songs from this album, but I also never think to listen to this album as a whole because there are 1000 songs on it.

This was a great album, it was legitimately surprising at times.

I'm no disco superfan, but this is one of the good ones, because it's got THE FUNK in it. Also: samples and beats that would end up in a million hip hop songs.

Of course it's good. (Not something I'd listen to that often day, though.)

I've never purposefully listened to The The before and ... man, it's really good.

I should like this — it hits some of those Neil Young / Built to Spill vibes that I go for — but it didn't quite click. I should listen again, but for now it's just a sort of generic 3.

This is one of those Legendary Indie Vibe Albums that I could never get into, probably because it sounds too much like a 00s band trying to record an 80s Don Henley album. (Also, there was one song that I skipped and then the next song started and it sounded literally exactly the same.)

I mean, man, it's the first Led Zeppelin.

This album is perfect 60s folk rock, and like so many of their contemporaries, their debut is essentially a greatest hits.

My favorite Stevie Wonder album with my favorite Stevie Wonder song ("I Believe")

I always wondered why I was drawn to Wire when I first heard them, beyond the start/stop crisp riffs and deceptively simple songwriting, and then I realized that a half dozen different genres that I love — from post-hardcore like Quicksand and Helmet to britpop like Elastica to that entire Minutemen/Black Flag scene to nearly the entirety of what would eventually become the "post punk" MTV revolution — all sprouted from its loins. This album rules, but it's also a bit longer than it needs to be. Love Wire, but don't always love a full album of Wire.

I do not like AC/DC. This album, however, is undeniable. I begrudgingly give it three stars.

I never think about Santana, and then Abraxas plays and I remember that there's really no better jammy guitar album.

I always think that Blood, Sweat & Tears are a folk rock band - like The Byrds or The Band - and then am always reminded that in fact they're actually more of a pop rock mainstay. My 16YO's show choir band played "Spinning Wheel" last year and she got to handle the bass line, so I kind of love the two singles on this album a lot now, but the rest is very of its time.

It's just a really great post punk album. Not five stars because the highs are just so much higher than the forgettable songs, but there aren't a lot of forgettable songs on here.

I should give it another chance, but I was kind of bored. Clearly from the era when indie rock exploded.

Hell yeah. It’s perfect.

It's great for what it is. Salsa with a hint of funk. I don't think I'd ever listen to it again, but I can't score it low because I dug it the entire time it was running.

Yeah, man. I still listen to this ALL THE TIME.

I appreciate the bluesy, Rolling Stones inspired sound, and I'd actively buy this if I found a used copy at a reasonable price, but in the grand scheme of things it gets lost within the rest of this genre's sound.

Reggae will never be my jam, but it's Bob Marley so it's not bad.

Kanye's a dummy, but this album is one of my five favorite hip hop albums of all time.

Of the The The albums I've heard, this is the one I forgot about.

Aw, I love this album and so does my kid. The hits are absolutely the Sound of the Indie Scene from its time, and they still hold up.

I love this album and also never listen to this album, because that's the story of Sonic Youth - you're rewarded for your patience with some utterly creative and weird music, but not in a way that makes them constant jams.

The hits are absolutely wonderful; it's not my style beyond that, but I could be swayed someday.

I mean, come on.

I still love the Kinks.

This went from "a Radiohead album I kind of like" to "one of their three best" over the past several years, for me at least. Its really good, and I still remember the entire "pay what you want" process when it came out. They really never miss.

"Eight Miles High" is really an amazing song, still. The rest was probably earth shaking at release, but as with any influential album, the original amazement fades as so many take up the sound.

One of the great albums from the Everything Alternative Is Signed To A Major Label movement.

It's fine!

This is Not My Thing ™

I, as a fellow Atom Heart Mother lover, feel bad that I've never listened to this album before. It's phenomenal.

The quintessential Stones album, and one of the few that actually lives up to the Rolling Stones hype.

There are few debut albums that prepare us for the future of rock better than this one did.

As an unabashed Pink Floyd fan, this is One Of The Great Ones.

It's fine! I get why people like it! But, it feels more like what would happen if Pulp started a T Rex cover band.

A perfect funk album, given 4 stars because funk isn't always my thing -- and yet, this one is.

A fun thing that Radiohead can do: record two nearly perfect albums at the same time and then, like, just hold off on releasing one of them for a year because why not.

Influential, and a good reminder that "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" is NOT actually a White Stripes song, but still not quite a thing I'd dive into.

Southern Rock can go to hell, usually, except for ZZ Top.

How did an album this weird become as popular as it was at the time? It's fun and good, but nothing I'd dive into more than this one time.

A nice little album.

Every time i listen to DNOTD I wonder how this became such a cultural touchpoint to the scene — it's disjointed and long and kind of a mess — until I realize that's exactly why it's great: it's the personification of the scene, a dozen pop songs hidden under the kind of cool that everyone could achieve yet no one had the guts to do.

if only the Pumpkins just kept doing this, instead of seeing the success of "Disarm" and deciding to make a bloated double album.

I'd have assumed that every Police album had sold 10 million albums, but despite how big they feel they were always still a kind of a new wave / post punk oddity on the charts. This still sounds like the biggest thing in the world, even today.

I did not think I was a Fatboy Slim guy, and then I listened to this entire thing and wondered why I never listened to them when I would write. It's: very good.

This FEELS like a singer-songwriter album from 2004, and i'm not sure that's a compliment.

Weird art-punk/new wave that's, I dunno, endearing and charming. The kind of band that's always fun to have pop up on a playlist but I wouldn't go crazy listening to entire albums.

This is one of the good ones!

This rules.

I dunno. I don't think I've ever fully GOTTEN the non-single Cream songs. Like, let's be honest, despite Clapton being a turd, those big singles have some legendary riffs. But the rest of it just sounds like generic rock.

I thought this was new to me, but I actually know a lot of these from indie/college radio. It's nearly perfect - late-era Bowie that keeps all of that glam bravado grounded with age.

This isn't bad, and I get why Jarvis and Pulp were into it - lumbering grooves that sound like proto-Pulp singalongs.

Duh.

Classic rock royalty that sounds like a sports commercial, except for one song: "Foreplay" (the intro to "Long Time") which is as close to actual prog rock as any classic rock radio gets these days. I'm all for power pop, but all the sharp edges have been sanded off. One star for ubiquity, two stars for "Foreplay."

Yeah, while this first album isn't as artistic and weird as her later stuff, it's still got some absolutely soul-bearing perfect songs. Give me "Shadowboxer" as her most perfect song. (At least: today.)

Nah.

This is very good study music. It's also very good in that it provides context for the more dynamic and interesting versions of this genre (Daft Punk, Justice) and how hard it is to make something simple sound good.

This is kind of THE Police album, huh? How weird that, on the last song of side one, they remembered they were THE POLICE and should probably mess around with some radio hits ... and then just launched into four straight all time classics.

A perfect early metal album.

It’s a classic BB King album that captures the mystique of his live shows.

I feel while some 80s new wave/pop feels like it could pop up now and still go hard, this album feels stuck, production-wise, and the rest of it doesn't really make up for that. It's not BAD, obviously, but it just doesn't do it for me.

I was surprised how good this was when it came out, and I'm still surprised that it somehow feels better and better each time.

I always struggle with this brand of rock, and I guess I can tell it’s good if you like the genre, but it’s just one single note the entire way through. The crowd pop as “Boys” begins is fun, as is the Bluesy Huey Lewis cameo.

It's hard to vote against this, an absolute masterpiece in the genre, his career, and the history of music in general. Sounds amazing, and the session players are as tight as a decades old group.

I dunno about this one: take out the vocals, and this hits that good good post punk weirdness from this era. But it's hard to take seriously with all the warbling and boop boops etc. etc.

Even though the Pavement boys are gone by this album, this still holds tight to Pavement-style slacker rock. Unfortunately this one never quite hit the way, say, Purple Mountains hit.

When Pink Floyd stopped writing 20-minute soundscapes, Tangerine Dream must have started. Title track gives good psych-era Pink Floyd vibes.

Indie folk was such an Entire Thing when this came out, and because of that — despite the fact that there are several wonderful songs on here — it feels very OF THAT TIME. I appreciate the CSNY-ness of it all, but it also played so much in the late 2000s/early 2010s that I'm burned out.

Grunge as a genre didn't age well — of the top grunge albums I loved at the time, I might only give five stars to two of them now (In Utero; Vs.). But, if there was one that would be close, it would be Dirt — closer to a metal album, Dirt was the closest the genre ever felt to feeling "grungy." (Mudhoney, Melvins, early Sub Pop stuff always felt more SLUDGE than GRUNGE, if I might make a very stupid album-reviewer-type-comparison). It sounds like middle school.

An obviously great album, though I’m partial to Sam Quentin

I don't know how many of these punk/post-punk UK bands we're going to get on this list, but it's getting hard to keep trying to differentiate them.

Nile Rogers rules. I cannot, however, listen to an entire album of disco in this, the year of our lord two thousand and twenty four.

Nostalgia bop, brings me back to driving to school with my mom.

Kendrick Lamar didn't need a diss track to win our hearts over. He did it with this album.

I thought I was decently well-versed in the world of 90s hip hop, but, I'll admit, I'd never HEARD of Ms. Dynamite at all and .... this is really really good?

I mean, it's f'n What's Going On. It's a top-ten album of all time for a reason.

It's like the whooshy spacy parts of the whooshy space Pink Floyd songs but without any psychedelic rock. Too busy to be ambient, too new age to be interesting.

When this came out, it was all over indie rock radio, which is wild to think about now. Mr Brightside gets all the attention, but Jenny Was a Friend of Mine has that rad bass riff and Somebody Told Me is weird and dark. The first half is nearly a perfect mid-2000s rock album, the second half gets boring so as an album it's pretty whatever.

What a weird choice for this list? Jurassic 5's first album is way better, and this one fell into an over-production trap: it's still bouncy and filled with interesting cadence, but it sounds like what someone might get if they threw "Safe hip hop for parents" into an AI generator.

In the 90s, there was a movement: britpop. Unfortunately, the album that forged that path was from a band that didn't put out an album during the peak of britpop — it's a little snotty and a little rocky and a little trippy and very British and The Stone Roses would be in the same breath as Oasis and Pulp and Blur if this would have been released four years later.

I tried with this one, and I have NO DOUBT it was as influential as it claims to be, but listening to this now, nearly thirty years later, all I can think of is "this album looks like an WinAmp skin and sounds like the kind of music a WinAmp skin would make if it could make music."

Rolled into this album with a vague memory of thinking it was disappointing. Turns out it just wasn't as rough as Live Through This; now, without any of the punk gatekeeping I remember from the late 90s, this album is considerably better than I remember. It's just that, back then, I didn't know what (or how good) power pop was.

One of the Important Neil Young Albums and often popped up on top of his "best albums" lists (I'll put Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere up there, but this one is close). This is the Neil Young archetype album, and it's perfect.

I'm not convinced anyone actually likes this album as much as they say they do, but they like the IDEA of this album an awful lot. There's so much better out there, but it was wildly influential and it helped create some of the stuff that, by comparison, overtook it completely.

I got bored. I understand why the people who like Nick Cave like Nick Cave, but to me he feels a little too "brooding college coffee shop" to me.

I don't think this is what Bowie expected when he became a rock star.

This is not what I expected: it starts off like a southern soul Beach Boys, and turns into a relatively interesting album by the end. The vibe change at the end of "Time" is really fun and changed my whole mind about this listen.

Guitar rock is really a thing, and this is a very good version of it, but man I've never really ... cared about Jimi? The hits are undeniable and the rest sounds like ... the same thing.

What a funny blip in the catalog: it won the Grammy for best album, but it's also the most forgettable (in my opinion, obviously) of the Big Four run from Talking Book to Songs in the Key of Life. It's still this brilliant work, but it's somehow dulled by the perfectness of everything around it.

A top five britpop album, in my opinion — a wonderful mix of that punchy britpop rock sound with the snarl of the toughest voice in the genre.

Throwback soul/blues-rock is fine, but this kind of falls into a weird in-between where it sounds like music for a car commercial. Grab your Sunny D and head to the beach.

You've got to be a special kind of rock star to create a side project that ends up being even more internationally popular than your first internationally popular band. (Also, this album still rips.)

The weird thing about the White Stripes is that they work better when they lean into the garage aesthetic, and this one always sounded like it was trying too hard to get another Seven Nation Army out there. It's still okay! But after listening to it again for the first time in a long time, I still only remember the singles.

The cover might be more iconic than the album, honestly. Blues-rock that became so ubiquitous that it now sounds dated and commonplace, but at the time was surely groundbreaking. Wikipedia suggests the live treatment is completely studio-driven, which really just means it sounds like it was recorded in the very back of a long room. More than anything, it highlights the fact that Janis was too big to be contained within a band. It's fine, but I doubt many people listen to this for the "backing band."

There's something about UK hip hop that just hits a very specific vibe, and while I have HEARD of Little Simz, I'd never actually LISTENED to Little Simz. This is actually incredible, I think I love it. Four stars for discovery, an extra star held back in case it becomes a regular rotator.

I think I have a specific idea of what Tom Waits is, and I think this is ACTUALLY what he is, and it's good but not for me.

Here's the thing about Lynyrd Skynyrd: I don't care for them even for a second. But: "Freebird" is actually great, with a special shout-out to Guitar Hero, the game that helped me realize that "Freebird" is actually great. Both of these stars are for "Freebird."

I went through a Doors phase early in high school. Then I got older and realized while the music is kind of fun, Jim Morrison is a blowhard pseudo-intellectual.

Instant five stars.

It's incredible, obviously.

Okay, listen - we've already talked about The Doors once and I already mentioned that I once liked The Doors because I was a kid and the drama and weirdness was very interesting to me but I "grew out" of it. That's not meant to be dismissive! That being said, there's something interesting about this first album - no bass player, just keys, a weird makeup: poetry, drugs, and an organ. I still don't think I'd ever listen to this voluntarily, but three stars for what this once meant and how original and unique it was.

An incredible album from front to back, full of hope and anger.

It's a good album! But, like, this is maybe one of the issues with the 1001 albums list: looking at the overall album list (you can find a spreadsheet online) there are ... three Pixies albums? And this one, which is GOOD but not, like, an album you need to listen to before you die if you've already listened to Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, was chosen over a bunch of artists that aren't represented but probably should be. anyway... four stars.

There are albums that should come with an automatic rating. This is one of them.

This is my favorite PJ Harvey album, and I could listen to "Good Fortune" every day for the rest of my life.

The One Before The Big One - the Rubber Soul of the Beach Boys ouevre. The shift here is that these songs still sound like every other Beach Boys song, it's just that they changed the lyrics to something other than the beach. A good record, but I would have a hard time picking this one out from any of the otherrs.

See, I love Blur, and I think "For Tomorrow" is one of their best songs, and YES, this is when they figured out "hey, let's be cheeky and extra British and just create weird singable songs" and basically pushed britpop a bit further than Suede had been able to do. So it's easy for me to give this a high rating. But, then, think of it like this: this is Blur's "The Bends." It works in parallel. Both bands recorded an album that sounded a bit like a last gasp of a dying scene (Pablo Honey / Leisure) and then shifted things to create what felt like a fresh new look at the band (The Bends / Modern Life). They followed these albums up with even better versions (OK Computer / Parklife) before eventually messing around and moving into True Art in their later years (OK Computer and on; Blur and on; - the only real difference is that Blur snuck a third cheeky album in before their art phase with The Great Escape). Anyway, this is all a way of convincing myself that it's okay to give this five stars. I'm doing it.

I might be in the minority here but other than "Heroes," which is a great song!, I just never jived with all of the second half space instrumentals. It felt like two ideas shoved together, like an old Yes album or something (side one is the singles, side two is the space opera).

I think there's a time and place for this album, and at those times it's a 5. However, now, with the warm glow of age and experience, this album feels like the audio version of the former player who has been sitting at the bar for six hours and still keeps trying to talk to you.